Why Should Big Business Care About Twitter?

June 16th, 2009

I just don’t see the value of Twitter to big business. Why would those of us in corporate America care or see value in using Twitter?
- CPA

Good question.  We’ve talked before about measuring your return on the time you spend on Twitter, and it’s important to make sure you’re getting value.  A lot of the media attention about Twitter right now seems to be focusing on how an individual can easily connect with a large network.  In fact that was the rallying cry of Ashton Kutcher as he raced CNN to 1 million Twitter followers.  He won that race.  The corporate Goliath fell, and Twitter was the new slingshot.  It’s a compelling story, and not completely baseless.

Twitter had it’s first big break through in the realm of big business, though.  Computer manufacturer Dell created a big stir when they announced at the end of 2008 that they had earned $1 million in revenue through posting discount offers on their Twitter account.  While Twitter can certainly help small business owners who are looking to make personal connections, there’s no reason corporate America can’t leverage this social media platform.

1. ) Create a culture – Twitter is an opportunity to develop a loyal following.  Just creating a Twitter account and sending out headlines isn’t enough, though.  You need to give them something through Twitter that they can’t find anywhere else.  Maybe it’s special discount offers.  It could be links to resources that you only share through Twitter.  How about a channel to get a quick personal response when they’re afraid they’ll need to wade through red tape?  Which leads to…

2.) Give your organization a face - We could blame Hollywood.  There’s a perception among the general public that big businesses are often evil, soulless entities that are only interested in profit.  Individuals are good and corporations are bad.  So give them an individual to connect with.  Ever eat at a restaurant where the chef comes out and asks you how your meal is?  That’s the feeling you should be striving to recreate. 

3.) Brand monitoring – Even if you aren’t personally using Twitter, millions of other people are.  When someone talks about your business or your product, that’s going to be seen by a lot of people.  If the comments are critical, you need to know about it and respond.  When someone complains about you on Twitter, you need to be watching for mentions of your name and immediately jump into the conversation to help find a resolution.

Tags: , , , ,
No Comments »

What’s My ROI On Twitter?

April 23rd, 2009

What kind of return on investment can I see with Twitter implementation?
- accountant

Measuring your return is one of the most overlooked aspects of a Twitter strategy (or any social media strategy, for that matter).  It’s very easy to fall into the trap of spending a ton of time fiddling around with Twitter.  After all:  it’s fun.  That’s why you need to spend your time in disciplined pursuit of your business objectives.  Defining those objectives is the first step to measuring your ROI.  Here are some possible goals you may have, and how to measure your success with each one.

1.) Driving website traffic.  This is the easiest goal to measure.  Check your server logs.  If you posts a tweet with a link to one of your pages, how many people visited that page in the next 24 hours?  Was that more or less than most other days? 

2.) Positioning yourself as an expert.  Establishing expertise is hard to measure on Twitter or anywhere else, but you do have some tools.  The number of people following you is a rudimentary metric of your perceived expertise.  The number of times you are retweeted can be a good indicator, since it demonstrates that people valued your content enough to pass it along to their followers.

3.) Industry research.  When you’re following your industry, your competition, or just mentions of your own brand, the measure of your success is going to be the information that you dig up.  What did you find?  How long would it have taken to find the same information on a traditional web search?  Would you have found it at all? Is the article date relevant to today? Most of Twitter’s information is very recent results.

4.)  Networking.  The metric here is how many people you meet and how well you can help each other.  (The geotargeting in Twitter’s search makes it very easy to find people locally that are talking about topics you want to comment on.)

5.) Finding clients.  Another very easy metric.  Just measure Twitter like any other lead source in your sales pipeline (and if you use Salesforce they have a Twitter tab in which to monitor your activity).  When you do a search for people that are experiencing the pain your product or service addresses, you can send them a tweet and think of them as a lead.  Go through your conversion funnel and just look at what the numbers are telling you.

That’s your return.  In all of these cases the investment is your time.  To be successful with Twitter you must allocate the time to it, but you should be careful not to go over that time.  Make a schedule and stick to it.  You’ll need to refine a schedule that makes sense to you, but a good place to start is 30-60 minutes a day.  Try that for a while and see what kind of return you’re getting.

Anyone getting a return on their Twitter investment that’s either more or less than they expected?

Tags: , , ,
3 Comments »